The Heart Of The City

Local city and county governments across the country are starving for cash, and many tough choices are going to have to be made on employment.  With falling home prices and commercial real estate floundering, draining property tax revenues and requiring local governments to pay to clean up the mess from foreclosures, the easy cuts have been long ago been made.

Now the bloody ones are coming.

Local government revenue has dwindled so severely that U.S. cities and counties will have to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs in the coming months, leaving communities without basic services and pressuring jobless rates, according to a new survey.

The survey, released on Tuesday by three government associations, aims to press Congress on pending legislation that would give them $75 billion over two years to preserve jobs.

Local and state government employment accounts for more jobs in the United States than construction and manufacturing combined. The survey by the National League of Cities, National Association of Counties and U.S. Conference of Mayors found that they are the primary employer in many communities. 

Those surveyed—214 cities with populations of more than 25,000 and 56 counties of more than 100,000 people—reported they will cut 8.6 percent of their full-time positions from 2009 through 2011. 

"If applied to total local government employment nationwide, an 8.6 percent cut in the workforce would mean that 481,000 local government workers were, or will be, laid off over the two-year period," the report said.

Some of those cuts have been made.  Thousands more are coming.  That means more cops, teachers, firefighters, city workers, hell entire departments are on the block.  The cuts will not make our country safer or more efficient, after all these employees spent money in their communities too and in a real sense it was stimulus spending by local governments and always has been.

Now that's being lost.  Most likely these jobs aren't ever coming back either...especially if anti-government Republicans have their way.

Hey, all those laid off cops should join private security firms protecting rich clients, right?